Love is a blazing, crackling, green-wood flame, as much smoke as flame; friendship, married friendship particularly, is a steady,intense, comfortable fire. Love, in courtship, is friendship in hope; in matrimony, friendship upon proof.

There is a good and a bad light in which every thing that befalls us may be taken. If the human mind will busy itself to make theworst of every disagreeable occurrence, it will never want woe.

All human excellence is but comparative — there are persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.

A good man will not engage even in a national cause, without examining the justice of it.

Romances in general are calculated rather to fire the imagination, than to inform the judgment.

Over-niceness may be under-niceness.

The eye is the casement at which the heart generally looks out. Many a woman who will not show herself at the door, has tipt the sly, the intelligible wink from the window.